PUBLIC PROCUREMENT REGULATION IN AFRICA BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abstract

Introduction Kenya is a country located on the east coast of Africa, with Nairobi as its capital. It has an estimated population of 38.53 million people. Kenya, a republic, is a constitutional democracy with a unitary system of government headed by the President; local administration is divided into sixty-nine rural districts, each headed by a commissioner appointed by the President. Consequently, there is a single public procurement regime that applies to all the tiers of government in Kenya; unlike in a federal government, where there are usually separate public procurement regimes for the federal government and the federating states. The Kenyan legislature, the National Assembly, makes laws for the country. However, subsidiary legislation forms part of the legal system. According to the Kenyan Constitution, the National Assembly, through the yearly Appropriation Act and other Acts of Parliament, authorises withdrawal of money from the consolidated fund and other government funds. This is the foundation upon which the public procurement regulatory framework of Kenya rests. Kenyan law is interpreted by its High Court and the Court of Appeal, whose practice and procedure are offshoots of the common law. With a GDP of US$34.51 billion, a gross national per capita income of US$770 and an annual growth rate of 3.6percent, Kenya, still a developing country, is the leading economy in East Africa. As at March 2012, the World Bank's aid portfolio in Kenya consists of twenty-four active operations and six proposed projects, with total investment of US$7.070 billion. The World Bank, in conjunction with the Kenyan government, in the late 1990s initiated a procurement reform process that resulted in the current public procurement regulatory framework of Kenya. One of the objectives of the Bank-initiated procurement reforms was to align Kenya's procedures for procurement with international standards, particularly the UNCITRAL Model Law on the Procurement of Goods, Construction and Services (‘UNCITRAL Model Law’), and the current public procurement regulatory framework of Kenya is in fact based on the UNCITRAL Model Law of 1994. Kenya is a signatory to a Customs Union established under the East African Community, which partly entails that certain goods are exclusively imported or procured from member states. In addition, Kenya is one of the nineteen member states of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), a trade bloc established in 1994 to replace the Preferential Trade Area (PTA) which had been in existence since 1981.